Design and Development of Fatigue Testing Machine for Rubber Components

Abstract

Mechanical Fatigue testing and life evolution is very important in design and development procedure to make sure the safety, reliability of part to be used. Structures, manufactured parts, and prototypes always need fatigue testing prior to deployment into the practical applications more likely in industries. This fatigue testing required a mechanical loading setup which predicts the lifetime of component. In this work design and development of low cost and high frequency pneumatic operated rubber fatigue testing system is presented. Cyclic load is applied through pneumatic system over number of cycles to test the rubber specimen and corresponding displacement and applied force is measured. This testing system consists of two portions namely mechanical and electrical setup. The whole system includes mechanical structure, pneumatic actuator, air compressor, proportional valve, load cell, signal generator and DAQ card for data acquisition. The measured parameters are then logged into computer system using LAB VIEW.